25 Amazing Neuroscience Facts And News That Will Blow Your Mind

New study shows how LSD affects the ability of the thalamus to filter out unnecessary information, leading to an "overload of the cortex" we experience as "tripping".

Habitual tea drinking modulates brain efficiency, suggests a new study that evaluated brain connectivity, the first compelling evidence that tea drinking positively contributes to brain structure making network organization more efficient.

Small clinical trial show reversal of cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease patients after just two months of treatment using electromagnetic waves via wearable head device. TEMT appears to penetrate the brain to break up amyloid-beta and tau deposits, slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s.

Sexual images are just as arousing for women as they are for men, suggests new brain scan research, which found that women’s brains react to pornography just as much as men’s, challenging the widespread belief that men get more turned on by visual stimuli.

A study of 17 different languages has found that they all communicated information at a similar rate with an average of 39 bits/s. The study suggests that despite cultural differences, languages are constrained by the brain's ability to produce and process speech.

The brain tunes itself to a point where it is as excitable as it can be without tipping into disorder, suggests a new study in rats. This criticality hypothesis asserts that the brain is poised on the fine line between quiescence and chaos. At exactly this line, information processing is maximized.

Scientists studied six patients who had half of their brain removed during childhood to treat severe epilepsy. Brain scans showed how the mind rewired itself to adapt, with the remaining hemisphere forming even stronger connections that let the patients develop language and motor skills.

Link between inflammation and mental sluggishness: People with chronic disease report severe mental fatigue or ‘brain fog’ which can be debilitating. A new double-blinded placebo-controlled study show that inflammation may have negative impact on brain’s readiness to reach and maintain alert state.

People who are "night owls" and those who are "morning larks" have a fundamental difference in brain function. This difference is why we should rethink the 9-to-5 workday, say researchers.

Scientists have discovered that a mysterious group of neurons in the amygdala remain in an immature state throughout childhood, and mature rapidly during adolescence, but this expansion is absent in children with autism, and in mood disorders such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and PTSD.

Boosting a single molecule in the brain can change “dispositional anxiety,” the tendency to perceive many situations as threatening, suggests a new study in nonhuman primates, which provides hope for intervening early in life to treat people at risk for anxiety disorders and depression.

People who play games – such as cards and board games – are more likely to stay mentally sharp in later life, suggests new study, which found that those who regularly played non-digital games scored better on memory and thinking tests in their 70s.

In a surprising finding using the standard animal model of Down syndrome, scientists reversed the intellectual deficits, generally thought of as irreversible, with drugs that target the body’s response to cellular stresses, suggesting it may be possible to do the same in humans with Down syndrome.

Just thinking about a bright light is enough to change the size of our pupils, even if there isn’t anything real for our eyes to react to, finds a new study in PNAS, thus giving a different meaning to old proverbs about the eyes being a window to the mind.

Researchers used machine learning to analyze 80,000 chords in US Billboard pop songs. Musical pleasure occurred when chords are not what the listener expect (low uncertainty, high surprise) or, conversely, when they conform to expectations (high uncertainty, low surprise), based on brain scan study.

Neuroscience study links white matter compactness to mood degradation during sleep deprivation. Some people get irritated if they do not get enough sleep but others seem to be quite resilient and show little effect. A new brain imaging study found that people with greater white-matter compactness tended to display a greater ability to sustain a positive mood during sleep deprivation.

The human brain can recognise a familiar song within 100 to 300 milliseconds, highlighting the deep hold favourite tunes have on our memory, new research from University College London reports.

Blind people who use echolocation, making clicks with their mouths to judge the location of objects when sound bounces back, unlike sighted people and blind people who don’t use echolocation, showed activation in the primary visual cortex similar to that of sighted people looking at visual stimuli.

Harsh sound like screams hijack brain areas involved in pain and aversion, making them impossible to ignore, suggests a new study, which found rough sounds with fluctuations in the range of 40-80 Hz particularly awful, frequencies used by alarms and human screams, including those of a baby.

Paralysed man moves in mind-reading exoskeleton. A man has been able to move all four of his paralysed limbs with a mind-controlled exoskeleton suit, French researchers report.

Scientists implant "memories" into bird brains to teach them songs they've never heard, using optogenetics, a technique where flashes of light are used to stimulate certain neurons in the brain, in effect, creating auditory memories that would normally be coming from outside.

Psilocybin-assisted mindfulness meditation linked to brain connectivity changes and persisting positive effects, suggests a new randomized, double-blind brain scan study. Psilocybin-induced changes in brain connectivity predicted positive changes in attitudes about life, social behavior, and mood.

Cannabis use associated with abnormal brain structure in region involved in processing facial emotion, suggests a new brain scan study, which found that teens and young adults who use cannabis weekly have abnormal brain structure in the region involved in processing and regulating emotions.

Researchers have created a compound, that when tested in mice, was able to promote the reconstruction of the myelin sheath surrounding neuronal axons. These findings could pave the way to a new treatment for combating demyelinating conditions such as multiple sclerosis.

A theory that Parkinson's disease can arise in the intestinal system and from there migrate to the brain has now gained support from new research, after seeing the disease migrate from the gut to the brain and heart of laboratory rats via the peripheral nerves.